The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai'i (review)

Christine Skwiot combines cultural and international history to show how tourism shaped the U.S. empire in Hawai'i and Cuba. Outside of Theodore Roosevelt's imperial fraternity and today's neo-cons, the term "empire" has not enjoyed easy acceptance in modern America. Skwiot convincingly argues that in the cases of Hawai'i and Cuba tourism's fundamental purpose has in fact been to represent empire, with its militarism, epidemics, economic imbalances, and race and class inequalities as invited and reciprocal rather than imposed. In short, travel writers not only produced tropical paradises, they helped to invent American exceptionalism.

Among the earliest agents of the travel empire were Abiel Abbot, an 1820s Boston Brahmin whose Cuba travelogue romanced the island as a potential white republic once Anglo-Iberian migration reversed its Africanization; and fellow Bostonian James Jackson Jarves whose 1843 History of the Hawaiian Islands rhapsodized the Sandwich Islands as a Pacific outpost for Anglo-Saxon civilization. The racial politics of slavery and the U.S. Civil War complicated Cuba's future. But Hawai'i's non-planter, white, haole elite, many of them descendants of Christian missionaries, promoted tourism to entice visiting Yankees to purchase Crown lands and subvert the island's native monarchy.

By the mid-1880s Hawai'i boosters had built roads to leading attractions and snapped up beachfront properties. At the same time they forced King Kalākaua to cede political power to an elected cabinet and constituted suffrage along racial lines. The U.S. war with Spain in 1898 allowed William McKinley to lay claim to Hawai'i as a pleasure port mid-way to America's new Philippine colony. The Hawaiian sugar trust Castle and Cooke invested in ships and hotels and the Hawaiian Chamber of Commerce initiated ad campaigns. Skwiot's description of the grand opening of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikīkī,, where separation between white clients and Hawaiian and Asian workers was maintained, is masterful. The highlight of the evening consisted of a reenactment of the landing of the island's first king on Hawaiian shores, complete with his retinue of warriors, oarsmen, and attendants, performed on the beach as strains of a foxtrot wafted from the hotel's ballroom. The hybridization of cultural displays disguised shotgun colonialism as a consensual marriage.

That is when Cuba came back into play. In early twentieth century Havana and the nearby suburb of Mariano, a cabal of Cuban officials, U.S. banks and real estate tycoons, and mobsters joined forces to expand public works, legalize gambling, establish a stylish country club, and open several high-end, racially segregated hotels. Stateside prohibition and a thriving commercial sex industry added to Havana's allure.

Although Cuban tourism declined during World War II, the "Monte Carlo" of the western hemisphere came back into fashion following Fulgencio Batista's military coup in early 1952. Bolstered by U.S. military aid and a transnational travel industry that included giants such as American Express, Hilton, and Pan American; the dictator transformed Havana into an Americanized version of a British colonial hill station. North Americans sipped mojitas at the Floridita, played roulette at the Casino Nacional, and ogled the rumba dancers at the Tropicana. As in Hawaii they deluded themselves that an unrepresentative regime stood for progress as well as fun. Empire? What empire?

By the end of the 1950s Cuba and Hawai'i had come full circle. The statehood movement in Hawai'i undermined haole dominance, but elevated the island's Asian emigrants rather than native Hawaiians. Welcomed into the union as a state in 1959, Hawai'i finally became a republican paradise—its colonial past erased by willful forgetfulness. On New Years day 1959, Batista fled Havana as Fidel Castro's insurgency swept down from the mountains. Skwiot highlights Castro's favorable treatment by the U.S. press, primarily New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, and his heroic stature among campus...